Quotes from Gavin de Becker

the brilliant book Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman describes seven key abilities most beneficial for human beings: the ability to motivate ourselves, to persist against frustration, to delay gratification, to regulate moods, to hope, to empathize, and to control impulse. Many of those who commit violence never learned these skills. If you know a young person who lacks them all, that's an important pre-incident indicator, and he needs help.

If you tell someone ten times that you don't want to talk to him, you are talking to them—nine more times than you wanted to.

Every human behavior can be explained by what precedes it, but that does not excuse it

We must learn and then teach our children that niceness does not equal goodness. Niceness is a decision, a strategy of social interaction; it is not a character trait. People seeking to control others almost always present the image of a nice person in the beginning. Like rapport-building, charm and the deceptive smile, unsolicited niceness often has a discoverable motive.

Believing that others will react as we would is the single most dangerous myth of intervention.

You have the gift of a brilliant internal guardian that stands ready to warn you of hazards and guide you through risky situations.

The solution to violence in America is the acceptance of reality

The unsolicited promise is one of the most reliable signals because it is nearly always of questionable motive.

Those men who are the most violent are not at all carried away by fury. In fact, their heart rates actually drop and they become physiologically calmer as they become more violent.

We must learn and then teach our children that niceness does not equal goodness. Niceness is a decision, a strategy of social interaction; it is not a character trait. People seeking to control others almost always present the image of a nice person in the beginning.

Threats betray the speaker by proving that he has failed to influence events in any other way. Most often they represent desperation, not intention.

When dreaded outcomes are actually imminent we don't worry about themwe take action. Seeing lava from the local volcano make its way down the street toward our house does not cause worry it causes running. Also we don't usually choose imminent events as subjects for our worrying and thus emerges an ironic truth: Often the very fact that you are worrying about something means that it isn't likely to happen.

I am capable of what every other human is capable of. This is one of the great lessons of war and life.

Most men fear getting laughed at or humiliated by a romantic prospect while most women fear rape and death.

The hijacking of an American jet in Athens looms larger in our concern than the parent who kills a child, even though the one happens rarely, and the other happens daily.